Auto-poetica: Representations of the Creative Process in Nineteenth-century British and American Fiction

The nineteenth-century Kunstlerroman self-consciously addresses the devices of fiction and in doing so, tends toward irony and self-reflection, and prefigures postmodernism. A work of art written about an artist creating a work of art is, in a sense, a novel in which the author is a character. The essays in this collection examine the work of major nineteenth century authors that attempted to merge fiction and reality into a unified whole. These novels paved the way for postmodernists who would use the artist-novel to self-conciously focus on the genre's particular conventions, to parody those conventions in order to accentuate the work's fictionality, and to expose the oppositions between fiction and reality. This collection thus reveals not only material concerns, but the underlying anxieties, drives, and joys, which are so profoundly linked to the creative process."

From inside the book

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Page 5Pierre is thrust into a moral quandary. His father transgressed in the one way
least permissible in prim and proper Pierre's reckoning of moral rectitude. Along
the way to his respectable marriage with Pierre's mother, the late Mr. Glendinning
...

Page 41As one writer — perhaps O'Sullivan himself — argued in "The Moral of the Crisis,"
the lead article of the first issue: The credit system had gradually expanded and
diffused itself, so as to swallow up the whole business of society, in all its ...

Page 184David DeLaura writes in his Hebrew and Hellene in Victorian England: Newman,
Arnold and Pater that "Pater's aestheticism ... is essentially a special morality —
not art for art's sake but art for the sake of a special conception of the perfected ...